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Moravec chose his friend and supporter, the drama critic Terry Teachout, to write the libretto, based on Somerset Maugham's sultry short story The Letter. MacKay described this as a sort of broadening of the palette of flavors in each season. The company's new general director, Charles MacKay, told me during a conversation earlier this week (interview forthcoming) that he envisions a return to the company's earlier commitment to atonal works (Henze, Berg, Stravinsky) for the season's world and American premiere slot, beginning with next season's world premiere of Lewis Spratlan's Life Is a Dream. In performance, the score plays in an easily digestible way, not unlike the work of many film composers, who tend to use modernistic effects learned from Bartók or Schoenberg only to underscore horror or other emotional extremes. As described in my preview of the score, Moravec uses dissonance in a pandiatonic but not particularly harsh style, seasoning triads with wrong notes. Santa Fe Opera's commitment to the staging of new opera continued this summer with Paul Moravec's first attempt at an opera, The Letter, the last commission of the Richard Gaddes era. Patricia Racette (Leslie Crosbie) and Roger Honeywell (Geoff Hammond) in The Letter, Santa Fe Opera, 2009 (photo by Ken Howard)